The Three Emperors Read online

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  In Russia, Nicholas was still a young man in need of a wife, and so far his marital hopes had been frustrated. For years his heart had been set on Alexandra—or Alix—of Hesse-Darmstadt, another of Queen Victoria’s numerous grandchildren. They’d first met in 1884 at her older sister Ella’s wedding to his uncle Grand Duke Sergei.* She was twelve, pretty and tragic—her mother had died when she was six; he was a young sixteen. After several days of “romps,”36 he wrote in his diary that they were in love. Four years later in 1889, Ella brought her sister to St. Petersburg for the season with the conscious intention of snaring the tsarevitch for her. By the end of the trip Nicky was well and truly caught. “My dream37—” he wrote in his diary two years later, in 1891, “one day to marry Alix H. I have loved her a long time, but more deeply and strongly since 1889, when she spent six weeks in Petersburg.”

  Alix was the sixth child of Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice, who’d married Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt. Darmstadt was a small, picturesque German duchy, best known as a centre of the arts, and for its well-connected, if impecunious, ruling family. Alix’s great-aunt had married Tsar Alexander II—a relationship that had helped keep the duchy from being absorbed by Prussia after it backed the losing side in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Alix’s mother had died in 1878 while nursing the family through diphtheria. Though she could be somewhat cavalier about her proliferating grandchildren, the queen had taken an intense interest in her six motherless Hessian grandchildren. She found them English governesses and tutors, from whom she demanded monthly reports. Each autumn they came to stay at Windsor and Osborne—“the best part of the year,” according to Alix. She described the queen as “a combination of a very grand person and Santa Claus”38—rather different from the near-divinity who intimidated her English grandchildren. The queen allowed the Hesse children a levity she didn’t permit many of the other grandchildren. (She patronized their father dreadfully, and when he secretly married his Russian mistress a year after Alice’s death, she browbeat him into having the marriage annulled.) Alix was noticeably her favourite. She was blonde and good-looking—at least after the fashion of the time—and Queen Victoria, who was very susceptible to beauty, described her as “the handsomest39 child I ever saw.”

  Perhaps as a way of feeling closer to the mother she had lost so young and to the grandmother who favoured her, Alix insistently described herself as English rather than German, speaking and writing by preference in English. It also expressed a sense of intense alienation from her circumstances. This was in part a not unusual aristocratic resentment at the Prussian domination of Germany—Alix claimed that Hesse-Darmstadt was separated “completely from the rest of Germany, which she looked on as Prussia and as a different country.” But it was personal too. Without a mother, a father, an army aristocrat who was often away, and with siblings considerably older than she, she had had a solitary childhood and had grown up self-absorbed, prone to pessimism and deeply religious. She was also mistrustful of, and extremely uneasy with, anyone beyond her immediate circle. She described an occasion on which she had to play the piano in front of her grandmother and guests as “one of the worst ordeals of her life.”40 Even her close family found her self-dramatizingly melancholic. “There was a curious atmosphere of fatality about her,” her English cousin Mary Louise wrote. “I once said, ‘Alix, you always play at being sorrowful; one day the Almighty will send you some real crushing sorrows and then what are you going to do?’” Her aunt Vicky couldn’t resist observing that the lack of a mother had made her “a little vain and conceited and affected at times.”41 But with shy, gentle Nicholas she had let her guard down. He was fascinated by her intensity and wanted to take care of her; she responded to his gentleness, vulnerability and warmth, and also perhaps to his slight air of submissiveness.

  There were, however, obstacles. Queen Victoria was implacably against her granddaughter marrying a Russian, and she was also “bent on securing42 Alicky [the British family’s name for her] for either Eddy or George.” Alix had scotched that plan by making it abundantly clear, when she was summoned for appraisal to Balmoral in the summer of 1889, that she wasn’t interested. Eddy, her older sister Ella (who was determined that Alix would marry Nicholas) said dismissively, “doesn’t look43 overstrong and is too stupid.” Eddy, for his part, developed a massive crush on her. It was a measure of how much the queen liked her that, though stung by her rejection, she decided it showed strength of character.

  The second problem was that Nicholas’s parents didn’t like Alix—perhaps recognizing her tricky personality would not be an asset in a tsarina. They had refused to give him permission to propose. Ella, who was popular with her in-laws, worked hard to bring them round. The third obstacle was altogether more difficult to overcome. When Nicholas finally gained his parents’ approval in January 1893 and went to Berlin to propose to Alix at another royal wedding—that of Wilhelm’s youngest sister Mossy to “Fischy” (Frederick Charles) of Hesse-Kassel—she turned him down. She couldn’t, she said, give up her Lutheran faith and convert to Russian Orthodoxy.

  Reeling from her rejection, Nicholas was cornered by Wilhelm. Since the Reinsurance Treaty had lapsed in 1890, relations between Russia and Germany had been markedly chilly. A war on import duties between the two nations had intensified to the point that German industrial heavy goods had been all but excluded from Russian markets, and Russian grain from Germany, its one-time largest market. Relations between the emperors were no better. “My father thought44 him an exhibitionist and a nuisance,” the tsar’s daughter recalled. Wilhelm complained bitterly to Queen Victoria that Alexander had snubbed and avoided him, and that he was massing troops on the German border. The two things—the snub and the threatening army—seemed equally offensive. In retaliation Wilhelm had told the German army to contact the Russian Polish separatist movement, with the apparent aim of encouraging an uprising—though nothing came of it.45 Most worryingly, however, a few months before, Russia had done the unthinkable and made a defensive alliance with republican France, sandwiching Germany between two potential enemies—a disastrous situation for Germany, one that Bismarck had spent decades working to stave off.

  Nicky’s arrival in Berlin revived Wilhelm’s appetite for “personal diplomacy.” He decided to arrange a one-to-one with the tsarevitch as a first step to improving Russo-German relations. He gave Nicholas a paper in which he argued that Russia should join the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy. The tsarevitch smiled and nodded and Wilhelm was convinced he detected a pronounced aversion towards France—an indication that the French alliance might perhaps not be long-lived. “Niki [sic] made an46 excellent impression on all of us, and proved himself in every respect a charming, agreeable and dear boy,” he wrote to Queen Victoria. “… He showed sound judgment and a quiet clear mind, which understands European questions much better than most of his countrymen and family”—a little parry at the tsar. In truth, however, Nicholas was just being amenable. Politics was the last thing on his mind. Crushed by Alix’s rejection, he confided in his diary that he wanted only to go home.

  Germany and Russia did end up round the negotiating table later that year, but it owed nothing to Wilhelm or Nicholas. The German chancellor, Leo Caprivi, feeling the need for a dramatic gesture to counteract the new French alliance, offered the Russian government a new trade treaty on extremely good terms. Its passage, however, enraged the government’s Junker supporters who counted on high tariffs to keep Russian imports from competing against their own more expensive grain. The treaty would play a significant role in Caprivi’s later downfall, and expose, not for the first time, the great divisions in German society.

  Back in St. Petersburg, Nicholas sought comfort from Mathilde Kschessinska and finally consummated the relationship. “I am still under47 her spell—the pen keeps trembling in my hand!” he wrote in his journal.

  George’s wedding was set for early July 1893. It was the biggest royal event in Britain
since the 1887 Jubilee, and the first public royal wedding in decades. “I should so48 much like Nicky to come, and he has never been in England. I do hope it can be arranged,” George asked his grandmother. (In fact, Nicky had come in 1873 aged five, but all he could remember was that the Shah of Persia who had been there too had shocked everyone with his “barbaric habits.”49)* The Romanovs accepted the invitation, and Edward, who loved organizing such things, set about arranging the tsarevitch’s visit. It was a mark of the young men’s closeness (and perhaps also of how few close friends George had) that Nicholas stayed at Marlborough House, where they spent George’s final bachelor evenings chatting until late in their rooms. Lest anyone think that such informality implied casualness, Edward crammed every moment of Nicky’s visit with incident—starting with a visit from his tailor, a bootmaker and a hatter. “Uncle Bertie is in50 very good spirits and very friendly, almost too much so,” Nicky, who found his uncle overwhelming, told his mother. “… Felt rather dizzy at first.” He was made an honorary member of the Marlborough Club; taken to watch polo; shown George’s new rooms in St. James’s Palace, which he thought “looks like a jail51 from the outside;” and taken to dinner with London’s grandest society hostess, Lady Londonderry (“Our hostess52 was delightful but a terrible flirt”). He went to “Captain Boynton’s World’s Watershow” twice. He gasped at the heat and marvelled at the 1,500 wedding presents—including a cow—the couple had been sent from across the empire. Watching the riders on Rotten Row, he commented, “what a pity53 we have nothing of the kind!” He even went to the Houses of the Parliament to hear the now elderly Gladstone speak. Though he was anathema to the European Right, Gladstone was world-famous as a great orator.* “I am delighted54 with London, I never thought I should like it so much,” Nicky wrote.

  What Nicholas didn’t love was that “Everyone finds55 a great resemblance between George and me, I am tired of hearing this again and again.” He may well have found the round of events—garden parties, dinners, luncheons—at which the British royal family had to show themselves off to the people and be gracious to them, an exhausting contrast to Russian court life, which actively discouraged too much interaction. The likeness, however, was powerful and it was now emphasized by Nicholas’s cultivation of a carefully trimmed Van Dyck beard just like George’s. It led, the queen wrote, “to no end of56 funny mistakes, the one being taken for the other.” At one garden party George was asked what he thought about London and Nicky was congratulated on his forthcoming wedding.

  The most surprising outcome of the visit was the effect that Nicky had on Queen Victoria. Age had not dimmed her intense dislike of Russia, and the two nations were bitterly arguing over Russia’s attempts to take over the Pamirs—the mountains bordering Afghanistan and Northern India. The British foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery, had recently threatened to send troops to root out Russian soldiers there. The queen received Nicholas at Windsor, arranging that she should be at “the top of the57 staircase” for his arrival and then process down slowly, presumably to demonstrate that she could keep anyone waiting if she pleased. She remembered the tsarevitch’s great-grandfather Nicholas I for his “undiplomatic bellowing,”58 and said publicly that she did not regard the current tsar as quite a gentleman. But Nicholas wasn’t at all what she had expected. He was so polite, so unassertive, such a gentleman (keen, naturally, to win the approval of his love object’s grandmother). “‘Nicky’ as he is always called”—you can virtually hear her melting—“… is charming and wonderfully like Georgie.” Even better, “he always speaks English & almost without a fault,” and he was—and this she really approved of—“very simple and unaffected.”59 Nicholas described Victoria as “a big round ball60 on wobbly legs,” who was “remarkably kind to me … She then awarded me with the Order of the Garter which was completely unexpected.”

  The wedding took place on 6 July. Nicholas wrote that May was “radiant” and “much better looking than her photograph.” She wore white satin embroidered with silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. A number of courtiers complained rather meanly among themselves about the stiff little bows she gave her acquaintances. Alexandra, Nicky noted, however, “looked rather sad in church … George and his sisters also.”61 George had written solemnly a few days before of going to church with Motherdear for “the last time alone62 with her.” While Nicholas stayed on in London, George and May went to Sandringham to spend their honeymoon in their new home, York Cottage, a few hundred yards from his parents’ mansion, answering mountains of correspondence. Three weeks later they came to Osborne for Cowes Week, and were greeted with arches garlanded with flowers, flags and 900 schoolchildren cheering from carts draped with green branches. That night May sat next to the kaiser at dinner. “Fancy me,63 little me, sitting next to William, the place of honour!!! It seemed so strange,” she wrote to her mother. Wilhelm—another family outsider—brought all his charm to bear upon her, though he had been as dismissive of her morganatic antecedents as his wife.

  Now it was Nicholas’s turn to win a bride. In March the following year he found himself reluctantly in the duchy of Coburg for the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernie of Hesse-Darmstadt, to “Ducky,” younger daughter of Affie, the queen’s second son, who had recently inherited the duchy from a childless uncle, and Princess Marie of Russia. Victoria herself and the kaiser and his mother were also guests. No one was very happy about the marriage except Queen Victoria, who had bullied the couple into it—Alix least of all. Ernie was homosexual but, as his grandmother endlessly reminded him, needed an heir, Ducky was very young and rich, and they were first cousins.* Alix’s father had died two years before, she was very close to Ernie and now she was about to lose her status as the head of his household. She forlornly planned a three-month trip to England “as I would64 only be in their way here.”

  The drama of the tsarevitch and the bridegroom’s sister upstaged the wedding. Everyone knew that Alix had rejected Nicky, everyone speculated what would happen when they met. “Even my dear Mama65 thought she would not accept him, she was so pointed about it,” Vicky wrote. “I was in a state of painful anxiety,” Nicholas wrote to his mother, who had insisted he be present. “All the relatives one after another asked me about her.” Everybody—except possibly Queen Victoria—wanted Alix to say yes. Her family felt she was throwing away a glorious opportunity. The English hoped she might improve Anglo-Russian relations. Wilhelm hoped she would improve Russo-German ones. Over several days the couple were locked in rooms together. “She cried the whole time and only whispered now and then, ‘No, I cannot!’” Nicholas wrote to his mother. “The Emperor did what he could. He even had a talk with Alix.”66 Willy, ever keen to place himself at the centre of things, would later take full credit for playing “the part of cupid” with the lovers—though no one else did. In his memoirs he described himself dragging the bashful suitor up to his room, giving him a sabre, putting his fur cap on his head, and thrusting a bunch of roses into his hands. “Now,” he said, “go and ask for Alix.”67

  On the last day of the wedding party, with Nicky’s uncles grand dukes Vladimir and Sergei sitting next door with Wilhelm, the couple was closeted one more time. “We were left alone,”68 Nicholas told his mother, “and with her very first words she consented … I cried like a child and she did too; but her expression had changed; her face was lit by a quiet content … She is changed. She is gay and amusing and talkative and tender … William was next door waiting for the end of our conversation with the uncles and aunts. I took Alix to see the Queen and then to Aunt Marie, where there were great embraces from the whole family.”

  The queen was “quite thunderstruck, as though I knew Nicky much wished it, I thought Alicky was not sure of her mind. Saw them both. Alicky had tears in her eyes, but looked very bright, and I kissed them both … People generally seemed pleased at the engagement, which has the drawback that Russia is so far away … But as her mind is made up, and they are really attached to one another, it is perhaps better so
.” She wrote of Nicholas: “He is so sensible and nice, & expressed the hope to come quietly to England to see Alicky at the end of June.”69 She insisted that Nicholas call her “Granny,”70 and for the rest of the visit she summoned them for morning coffee in her rooms and made them pose for photographs—photographs in which Alix remained resolutely unsmiling.

  Victoria was deeply proprietorial of Alix. “As she has71 no Parents, I feel I am the only person who can really be answerable for her,” she told Nicky. “All her dear Sisters … looked to me as their second Mother.” She worried about her too, bombarding Nicholas with letters through the spring and summer of 1894 about Alix’s health and her “nerves.” Since her father’s death Alix had begun to complain regularly of exhaustion and pains in her legs. She seems to have had a period of depression, possibly even a breakdown. Did the queen acknowledge to herself the obvious truth that Alix’s “nerves” and her almost pathological discomfort in the company of people she didn’t know made her entirely unsuited for the public role of tsarina? Alix put the queen’s anxiety down to possessiveness. “Please do not72 think that my marrying will make a difference to my love for You,” she reassured her. “Certainly it will not, and when I am far away, I shall long to think that there is One, the dearest and kindest Woman alive, who loves me a little bit.” There weren’t many people who dared to call the queen a “Woman.”

  “I am quite73 certain that she will make you an excellent wife and she is charming, lovely and accomplished,” George wrote to Nicholas—in English naturally—in what seems to have been his first letter to his cousin, signing himself, “Ever your most loving cousin Georgie.”

  “My dearest old74 Georgie …,” Nicholas replied, writing as he would to all the British royal family, in his own impeccable English, “you can judge of my joy & of the state of happiness I am in now. I am delighted to be here at Coburg & find this place beautiful. Only the time is so taken up by the family (as in Denmark) that I find it even cruel to be torn away from my beloved Alix for a few hours, as I would prefer spending them with my own little bride!” An affectionate, if uninspired and somewhat desultory—once or twice a year at most—correspondence was born.